Oetzi, the famous ice mummy, found at the border of Austria and Italy has remained in the news ever since its unsettling find in 1991. After the border dispute about his national affiliations, settled in favour of the Italians, the dispute about the finder’s fee has finally been settled last week. An Italian court has ruled and reinstated that the council and its provincial museum should compensate the remaining finder. The finder’s fee agreed upon amounts to 150,000 Euros, which seems to be a better reflection of the “25% of a discovery’s value” than the 10,000,000 of the pre-Euro Italian currency (i.e. 5,000 Euros) proposed in 1994. However, in several respects it sets a precedent: not only is the amount of the finder’s fee itself unprecedented, but also the way in which it was settled has far-reaching implications . The court rule takes into account the revenues of the museum that currently houses the unprecedented find. In other words, the value of Oetzi has been set after the fact and not according to the intrinsic value of the archaeological find, as for instance in the British Treasure Act. It would seem that we can expect more long-lasting law suits to follow in other cases based on this precedent. We can only hope for the heirs of the finders that the fee is not cursed, as the find itself, but for archaeology it is far from a blessing.
October 12, 2008 at 10:27 pm
You could say, though, that ‘reimbursing’ treasure hunters in the UK is rarely about the object’s ‘intrinsic’ value – eg. gold content. There may be standard market prices for certain artefacts, but real, archaeological value doesn’t play much of a part (otherwise perhaps stratified sediment or carbonised wood may be worth something). I suppose rarity and other forms of significance are criteria influencing whether the object is acquired by the state, but the actual fee is more the ‘antiquarian value’ … In any case, the state can nowhere near afford to acquire all the ‘Treasure’ being dug up by metal detecting enthusiasts.